A Year in Reading: Tess Malone

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2014 has been a year of transition for me. After 19 years of being a student, I graduated with my master’s in journalism from the University of Missouri in May. By the end of the month, I moved to Atlanta, a city I had only been to twice before. And in the beginning of June, I started work as a copy editor for a magazine. Yes, I’m a single girl living on her own in the bright, big city and working in journalism — my life is a romantic comedy waiting for Ryan Gosling to arrive.

Although my books were some of the first things I unpacked when I got to my new apartment, considering I close read for a living now, I haven’t had much time to read for fun. But the books I did read fell into a certain category: young women trying to figure out their place in a new world (I wonder why?). My new city survived two historic fires and is often a backdrop in apocalyptic TV shows and movies, so I didn’t have a hard time getting sucked into Edan Lepucki’sCalifornia and Emily St. John Mandel’sStation Eleven. Edan’s end of the world is shockingly intimate and real — and all the more terrifying because of this. I loved both Cal and Frida even though they stubbornly tried to get me not to, and I decided my artifact would be a beer opener. Emily’s dystopia is visceral yet hopeful — the kind that keeps you up late to read more. Yet the most provocative book in this category wasn’t in a not-so-distant and bleak future, it was immediate and raw. The best book I read in 2014 was Lena Dunham’sNot that Kind of Girl.

I should note that I started off 2014 trying to absorb all of the wit and wisdom in The Most of Nora Ephron, but half a year later, I needed someone more relatable, someone who didn’t have it all. After all, the title of Lena’s book is about defining yourself by what you aren’t, my favorite and most detrimental 20-something hobby. Yet in Lena, I found a girl who made the same mistakes I had or even worse, but she could write about it with a humor, vulnerability, and the self-awareness that was missing from Hannah Horvath. But like her alter ego, Lena doesn’t apologize for who she is even as she admits some terribly intimate secrets and character flaws, and this is why she is both one of the strongest voices in film and, now, evidently, in writing. Plus, the book is hilarious. Whether you like her or not, Lena Dunham is a new literary voice to be reckoned with — cutting, funny, and sometimes brutal.

And this is the type of writer and woman I want to be, not fodder for a Ryan Gosling film, but witty, honest, and strong.

Isak Dinesen sends you on your way to wherever you are going to end up, though who knows where that might be. Better yet, once you finally arrive where you’ve been headed all along, you can’t exactly say how you got there.

Hugo Hamilton is the author of the New York Times notable memoir The Speckled People and its sequel The Harbor Boys. His most recent book is the novel Disguise. He has been awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, France's Prix Femina Etranger, and Italy's Giuseppe Berto Prize. He lives in Dublin.It's always fascinated me how history is used in order to accommodate the present. For years we heard the maoning in Ireland about Eamon De Valera - freedom fighter, treaty-opponent, head of state in the fledgling Irish state whose vision of the Irish future was derided for so many years after his death as a home-spun mess. At last, we have a biography of the man which gives a deeper understanding of his character and his time. Judging DEV by Diarmuid Ferriter examines history from a new perspective, with a touch of sociological instinct at the core of his thinking.The Shores of Connemara by Seamas Mac an Iomaire (translated by Padraic de Bhaldraithe) Imagine Darwin arriving on the shores of Connemara. This small account of a local fisherman off the coast of Connemara, places us back in time almost a hundred years to a vision of the sea and the land in an innocent state. It is seen not by a professional marine biologist or botanist, but a local expert who observes everything he sees with great curiosity. In his descriptions of sandhoppers, for instance, and why they hop on a fine evening, is always a mixture of scientific enquiry, folklore, religion and childish delight. His book, above all, reduces the pace of change and gathers up all the qualities of time, the absence of hurry, in the landscape of the west of Ireland.More from A Year in Reading 2008

5 comments:

Tess Malone, judging by your promotion of Dunham’s book I strongly disagree with your self evaluation as a “close” reader. You may be a close friend of Lena’s,
but a “close” reading of her book can only lead to disbelief that it was ever published. Oh wait! Lena’s a celebrity. And I just reread Tess, that you are under 25. So I take it back.

This is lovely! Twenty years ago I was a single girl living alone in the bright, big city — also a copy editor. Now I am old and jaded, and I have often wondered what Lena Dunham means to women her own age.

Suggest that if you would like to watch the Millions Comment section light up like a Roman candle (and perhaps spontaneously combust) you collaborate with Blake Butler on an “experimental” review of the next season of “Girls,” focusing on Hannah Horvath’s tenure at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. :)

And I really liked this piece — it actually made me interested in the book. And I love the personal spin you gave it, and your take on young women trying to figure it all out. Had not seen that specifically in Station 11 until you said it. Thanks

Liz Moore graduated from Barnard College in 2005. Her first novel, The Words of Every Song, centers on a fictional record company in New York City and the lives of a broad set of characters connected to it. A musician herself, Moore has performed at many of New York's institutions. She released her first album, Backyards, now available on iTunes and CDBaby, in September. Her websites are www.lizmooremusic.com and www.myspace.com/lizmooremusic.I quit my full-time job and started an MFA program this year, which has given me the opportunity to both read a lot of great stuff and berate myself daily for not being as literate as my classmates.Nevertheless, here are some books I have read and enjoyed this year: Ishiguro'sRemains of the Day; Goodnight Sisters, selected columns by Irish journalist Nell McCafferty; and, because quitting my job has caused me to take up babysitting, quite an assortment of children's books. My favorite are the Fancy Nancy series and every Barbie book ever written, mainly because some of them include photographs of actual plastic Barbie dolls stiffly pursuing various leisure activities, such as tennis and baking, and I cannot emphasize enough how incredibly weird and awesome this looks.I also re-read Durrell'sAlexandria Quartet. These are my desert-island books: I could read them monthly, I think, and still come up with new visions and versions of his beautifully imagined characters and their intertwined lives.More from A Year in Reading 2007